by

Search form

Cohort follow-up

The field of health informatics is rather large and Epiconcept has created many different information systems. We have selected a few of them that represent certain categories of information systems.

The goal of cohort follow-up is to be able to follow a group of individuals, usually for a study, over a certain time period. During the time interval, different information about these individuals can be gathered and analysed.

The Epipage Project

The goal of the EpiPage project is to follow a cohort of children pre-maturely born in 2011 in various maternity wards throughout metropolitan France and some of its overseas terratories. Each year, the parents of these childrens must fill in a questionnaire about the general state of health of the child. In parallel, there are supplemental questionnaires that are created to deal with specific health issues for certain subgroups of this cohort.

Each new year of the study, upon request from the research team who has separated the cohort between those continuing and those not continuing, a new application based on the previous version is created. Each version of the application is created with the latest version of Voozanoo and allows the researchers to analyse the year-to-year data.

Organisation

The Epiconcept project team is linked directly with the Epipage team at the Inserm (National institute of medical and health research). For related projects, a direct line is created between the additional researchers and the Epiconcept project team.

Collaboration

During the development phase, each Thursday the Epipage team would send a document to Epiconcept clearly noting their test results. The Epiconcept team would then verify each item and give an estimate as to when the bug fix or new function would be in place. Once the project was running, some requests would be made to the Epiconcept team to help a user who got blocked on some issue or to add some small new function that was requested by users on the front lines.

Advantages

This system allows the coordinators at the national level in Paris to have information about the cohorts and subcohorts in real time. The information is entered at the regional coordination level (the ones that are responsible for keeping in contact with the families) or directly by the parents who have received a link by email to go directly to the questionnaire.

Other Epiconcept Voozanoo projects

“Phare” application chosen by Proche network

The Regional University Hospital Center in Lille, France has chosen to impliment EpiConcept’s Phare information system for people with hereditary predispositions to cancer. Phare is a software application to register and follow up patients with a hereditary risk to cancer and to manage their personalised treatment plan. Phare is based on Voozanoo 3.

The National Reference Center for Cytomegalovirus to use Voozanoo

As part of the Cytomegalovirus (CMV) epidemiological surveillance effort in France, the National Reference Center for CMV has chosen EpiConcept’s Voozanoo platform to collect infection declaration questionnaires.

The goal of this project is to create a patient follow-up system for the 25 expert centers in the French national clinical research network on Parkinson’s disease (NS-Park, FCRIN). The application is used as a centralised information system for medical personnel.

Myology Institute begins new study using Voozanoo

The Myology Institute is creating a natural history prospective study of 70 patients infected with spinal amyotrophy type 2 and 3. This study is coordinated by Dr. Laurent Servais. It is a multicentric study involving nine centres in three countries (France, Germany, Belgium).

Overhaul of the Revala 13 observatory database

The REVELA 13 observatory is a surveillance programme for kidney, bladder and acute Leukaemia cancers in the Bouches-du-Rhône department of France. It is upgrading its Voozanoo information system to a relational database with geographic metadata.

Creation of a questionnaire platform for the “Constances” cohort

EpiConcept has put in place a Voozanoo platform for collecting information from the participants of the Constances cohort (www.constances.fr). This platform allows the cohort management team to create their own questionnaires.

Information system for fighting malaria in Thailand and Myanmar

The Shoklo Malaria Research Unit had created its own information system in 2014 using the publicly available Voozanoo portal and have since contracted EpiConcept to put in place new capabilities. This information system for fighting malaria is used in Thailand and Myanmar.

E4N, a large epidemiological study on families to use Voozanoo

Inserm’s Unit 1018 team 9 “Nutrition, hormones and women’s health” has chosen EpiConcept to put in place its data collection platform for their extensive E4N study. The E4N public web site can be found at https://e4n.fr.